Bohnaparte, Ice Lake, Keythedral, Puerto Rico

We had four players last night and tried a bunch of new games before closing with our now almost-required-by-law game of Puerto Rico. Here's the detailed report.

Bohnaparte Hanno Girke, one of the principals of Lookout Games and the designer of High Bohn (which I consider the best expansion for any game, ever) now lives in Seattle and we've welcomed him into out gaming group. He brought a pre-press copy of the newest Bohnanza expansion which Lookout will be releasing as a limited edition in late April.

Hanno described Bohnaparte as Bohnanza meets Risk. There are no new beans this time. The new cards are arranged in a large Catanesque hexagon, and conquering these is now the goal of the game. Players start on a home card and can expand from there by making attacks at the end of their turn. Each attack costs 1 coin-- coins are no longer victory points. The attacker plays a card from their hand, the top of the deck, or their "depot"-- a 3rd field replacement into which players can "plant" a limited number of cards for the express purpose of using them in battles later. The defender then does the same. High card wins, ties going to the defense. When the game ends, each territory a player controls is worth 1-3 victory points. Some also offer benefits during the game-- plantations let you flip an addition card at the start of your trading phase, and villages let you draw an extra card in your draw phase. These effects stack, so you could conceivably flip 5 cards and draw 6! Having more cards is an enormous advantage, since your hand size dwindles not only as you trade and plant, but also as you attack and defend. Suddenly all those 18s and 20s are the most valuable cards in the deck and highly prized.

Our game ended in a 2-way tie at 7; scoring is fairly low here, so ties seem like they'd be fairly common. Other than that quibble, the game worked quite well. Buying a depot early is essential, as it gives you a way to save your high cards for battle instead of being forced to plant them. It's also to your advantage to save your coins up and make lots of attacks in a single turn, allowing you to target the same player repeatedly and exhaust his ammunition. Doing so exhausts your own ammunition as well, however, so unless you want to take your chances with the deck, you're somewhat limited in how many viable attacks you can make. The tactical situation on the board also affects the trading situation. I'm less likely to trade with someone bordering one of my territories, since I'd rather they didn't get a coin they could use to attack me.

Bohnaparte is a nice change of pace, but High Bohn is still the standard by which all other expansions are measured.

Ice Lake: Small publisher Live Oak Games produced Ice Lake. And while the graphic design on their box and web site could use some improvement, the components are solid. Players secretly write a list of skating instructions (left, straight, right) and then execute them one at a time, cracking the ice in their wake with dry-erase markers. If a player is isolated from the shore by being surrounded by cracks, he's eliminated. Last man standing wins. We had some confusion over the elimination rules, which we found very unclear-- the rulebook could use some editing, with additional examples. The game itself was lackluster. There wasn't much in the way of excitement and what strategy exists is pretty straightforward. Heading into the center seems like a bad idea-- you want to say close to the shore. In some ways it seems like a 2-dimension version of Nim. Make as few moves as you can, wait until someone else screws up. Perhaps we're missing something. I'll give it another shot with a different group of people and see.

Keythedral: Second try at this, this time with 4 players instead of 3. Our previous town was long and thin, while this one was more compact. I really like the production mechanism here, of each house being numbered and all houses of a particular number getting to send out a worker to an adjacent tile. It creates some great strategic chain reactions. You definitely prefer to abut your left-hand neighbor, since you'll always play before him unless he goes first. The game moves pretty quickly once people understand what's going on. Our game had a funky ending. I took the last 3 tile, which gave each of my opponents the opportunity to trade for the craft cubes needed for each of the 4s. So there was no way I would get any of the 4 tiles. I decided to gamble and traded for a gold cube on spec. When the 5s got flipped, they were perfect-- Gold red red and white white red red, and I had lots of red cubes. I was pretty sure I needed both tiles to win, however, so instead of buying the gold tile I traded for a white cube. This put me up-tempo on that tile, with my opponents knowing that I could buy the gold one at any time. Rather than chase me futilely, two of them dropped out and bought laws. I traded again and bought the white tile, then bought the gold when it came back to me-- only to get hit by the Design Change law which Damon had just drawn! The new tile was terrible for me, and I wound up not getting it and losing the game by 2. Still not sure how I feel about that. It seems like those powerful laws are generally going to get saved for the end, and the 5 tiles are just crucial to winning. So the last turn of the game seems likely to be steeped in chaos. There's enough interesting stuff going on here that we'll be giving it some more outings soon.

Puerto Rico: With expansion, of course. Michael loves the library and bought one very early, while Nate went the aquaduct route and Damon and I both picked up the black market and pursued factories. As almost always happens when I get the black market, I almost never used it. I think I used it once, turning a corn into a discount. But I'd still rather that I have it and not an opponent. I got my factory fully operational with all 5 good types very early, but rather than buying a harbor as I planned, I found myself with 16 gold. So I bought a couple of large buildings and cranked up the pace of the game. When we ended, my opponents had 31-34 points and I had 51 (13 from shipping). Recognizing what opponents are doing and modifying your plans accordingly is key in PR. When opponents bought Libraries, it behooved me to give them as few opportunities to choose a role as I could. Abandoning my harbor plans, especially in light of Nate's increased production thanks to his aquaduct, was essential. Almost a year and over 200 games in, and Puerto Rico is still a joy to play.

Posted by Peter at February 26, 2003 01:04 PM